The selection or "sampling" of custom floor coverings and other fabrics has been attended by various inefficiencies that stem from the difficulty of visualizing new color configurations for those fabrics as they would really appear. Typically, sales representatives have been limited to the display and sale of only those models and color schemes they are able to carry along from site to site. Turning around a custom design sample, moreover, has been a time-consuming and expensive proposition. Before an accurate visualization of the sample is possible, it is necessary to select and specify a custom order, to transmit the order to a mill, to produce a corresponding sample at the mill by a labor-intensive process, and to await shipment of the sample. Even assuming a particular customer were able to visit a mill at which custom samples could be produced, the time and expense involved in experimenting with various color schemes and producing fabric and textile models would itself be prohibitive and could impose a limit on the range of options that a customer could explore. The variety of available models of floor coverings and other fabrics has proliferated as a result of improvements in fabrication technology, among other factors, which has increased the number of choices available to designers and other persons choosing custom carpet. This trend has further complicated the customer's decision process.
Rather than persisting with the arduous process described above, it would be vastly preferable for a sales representative to be able to visit a customer without needing to bring along the full panoply of models and colors, and yet still enable the customer to accurately visualize the gamut of possible design choices. Still more helpful would be an ability to permit the customer to independently vary the treatment (e.g., the color) of components of images of a floor covering or other fabric essentially at will, to store one or more representations of these variations, and specifications of samples embodying particularly promising design specifications, to quickly generate a set of alternative designs based on different models and with different color schemes, and to be able to compare and contrast the alternatives as a method of winnowing the set of design options to one of manageable size. Once a set of design alternatives has been chosen, it would greatly assist vendors as well as the customer to be able, in comparatively short order and in a convenient fashion, to perform a side-by-side comparison of the design alternatives. No such capability has been available, however.
Perhaps the most challenging obstacle to assisting in the design and selection of custom fabrics is presented by the sensitivity of the human eye (particularly the well-trained eyes of design professionals) to shortcomings in the predictive representations of custom articles. This sensitivity places a premium on the reality of the representation despite the variation of image parameters such as color. A system for representing and allowing the manipulation of high-resolution images therefore most preferably should provide an ability to manipulate parameters of a photographic image, and to do so with convenience and convincing results. Such a system should be able, for example, to modify the color and structure of components in a photographic image of a floor covering or other fabric, and, particularly, to do so in the vicinity of shadows or other factors that may tend to undermine the realism of the image when a color transformation has been requested. To date, however, capabilities of this sort have not been available.